this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2024
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A "burner" account? Never heard it called that before. "Sock puppet" or just "puppet" makes much more sense.
Burner feels like such an old school term. I've more often heard "alt", "Smurf", or "finsta". The last being a portmanteau of fake Instagram account
An alt account is one for a different purpose. For example, work and personal, not necessarily for espousing an opinion. A smurf account is one of many designed to overwhelm a system. A finsta is for satirizing yourself or shitposting.
And in World of Warcraft they called accounts "toons". I've never understood that one.
I always remember “toons” referring to your character, rather than your account. Kind of like the “cartoon character” you’re playing is how I understood it.
Does it let you have multiple characters under one account? I never played it, so I don't know.
Either way, that name never really made sense to me.
Last I played years ago I think you could have 10? And that was per server, there were tons of servers to choose from, so if you wanted more, you could.
Yes, up to 10 per server, and you could have characters on multiple servers.
I remember seeing the term even while playing pre-WoW MMO’s